“May I speak with you, mistress?” said the woman. Adele turned.
“My name is Tovera,” said the woman.
She was Markos’s aide.
A quartet of burly footmen preceded a jitney driving down the street. Adele didn’t recognize their colors, puce and green. The lunch crowd squeezed toward the side to give them room.
“There’s a courtyard a few doors down,” Tovera said. The bruises on her face and exposed hands had faded to sepia and a sickly yellow. “It should be quieter. There’s no one in the house now.”
She stood, smiling faintly. The wince as she moved was almost imperceptible. “They were buried last week.”
“I thought you were dead,” Adele said.
That was half true. Adele had never considered the aide to be alive; or at least, a living human.
“Move it!” snarled one of the servants clearing a path for the jitney. He raised his baton, to prod or strike.
Tovera turned. “Don’t even think about it,” she said pleasantly.
The servant jerked back. “Well fuck you, then,” he snarled, but in a muted voice. He stepped around the two women and pushed a pair of strangers against the lunch cart.
Adele took her hand out of her pocket. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s get out of the street.”
The door had been opened with axes. A mythological frieze decorated the panel’s bronze facing. Adele paused for a moment to finger a delicately molded satyr carrying off a nymph; both figures had been decapitated by the same stroke.
Adele couldn’t feel sorrow for dead strangers; but the artwork which had shared their destruction made her face tremble to behold.
She walked through the littered hallway, following Tovera to the courtyard in back. A citrus tree was in bloom, and half the daffodils had survived being trampled.
Tovera seated herself on the bench built into the courtyard wall. Adele sat on the opposite side, avoiding the pool of flaking blood which tiny insects were carrying away.
“I had a hand free,” Tovera said. “I dug myself out brick by brick. It was easier after I uncovered my face and could see again.”
“What do you want?” Adele said. She didn’t think the aide intended to kill her, but she couldn’t imagine any other purpose for this meeting.
“I told Markos you were too dangerous to use the way he tried to,” Tovera said musingly. “He didn’t believe me. He didn’t think I could know anything about people.”
She smiled. “But I knew you, Ms. Mundy.”
“What do you want?” Adele repeated.
“I want to serve you,” Tovera said. She was still smiling.
“Don’t be absurd,” Adele said. She stood up. “You’re too dangerous to have around.”
Her face hardened. “You’re too dangerous to live, Tovera. Good day.”
“Mistress!” the aide said. Adele paused on her way out of the garden and faced Tovera again.
“There’s a piece of me missing,” Tovera said. “Do you think I don’t know that? I can watch other people, mistress. It’s like running my fingers all around the edges of the hole, but that doesn’t put the piece back.”
She stood, walked a step closer, and knelt at Adele’s feet. “Let me use you for the piece of me that isn’t there,” she whispered.
“Get up,” Adele said. “For God’s sake.”
Tovera rose gracefully despite the pain Adele knew must twist every muscle. That the aide had survived the wall’s collapse was perhaps less surprising than the fact she could still move.
“Markos had a goal,” Tovera said softly. “He planned to be Guarantor of the Alliance some day. I didn’t believe that, but it didn’t matter. I would have died for him, mistress, because I don’t have a goal: only the tasks somebody else sets me. And I think you understand that.”
The implications of Tovera’s smile were a black pit that tried to swallow Adele Mundy’s soul. Adele’s mind formed the words, “You’re insane!” but she didn’t say that because it wasn’t true.
Tovera was correct: she was missing a piece. She was no more insane than Adele’s pistol was. Either one would kill when instructed to, without compunction and without remorse.
Adele’s mind said, “I’m not like you,” but she didn’t speak those words aloud either. Instead she said, “Why did you come to me, Tovera?”